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Category Archives: Movies

Man of Steel, the movie that dares not speak its name, uttering the S word only once[1], opens in a CGI sci-fi universe reminiscent of Avatar. No giant Smurfs, but plenty of bizarre creatures and vaguely cloud-forest images. Russell Crowe shows up, reprising his weird fake English accent[2] from Les Mis but now playing a Jedi, including requisite Prequel Mullet, and before long the movie looks like Star Wars by way of Alien, a kind of PG-13 HR Giger, biomechanical but desexualized, down to the Kryptonian asexual reproduction, even as everything on Krypton also looks like a phallic symbol. (They’re obviously sublimating their sexual frustration.)

Cute little Kryptonians!

Then Michael Shannon shows up, and you know he’s a bad guy because of the shape of Michael Shannon’s head.[3] Krypton blows up on cue, Kal El is launched in another phallus, and before long, Clark Kent is a grownup on Earth—33 years old, a portentous age that the movie does not fail to point out to us. Then we’re in X-Men territory, as the heavily muscled and even more heavily chest-haired[4] Henry Cavill drifts, just as heavily muscled and equally hirsute Hugh Jackman did as Wolverine over a decade ago, trying to understand his place in the world, the charm on his necklace again his only clue. Cue “Seasons,” the depressing Chris Cornell acoustic grunge song from the movie Singles, as the Artist Formerly Known as Superman swipes a conveniently flattering flannel shirt from a clothesline and hitchhikes to the next identity a la David (not Bruce) Banner in the TV show The Incredible Hulk. If only the movie played that music instead:

The movie is cut with flashbacks to young Clark’s childhood, where, rather than having super abilities, he’s treated, and behaves, more like a child with disabilities. It’s an interesting metaphor that the movie doesn’t do much with—Smallville, the TV show, did it much better. Ma and Pa Kent show up, although Kevin Costner’s Jonathan isn’t what I associate with the role. Rather than teaching Clark to celebrate who he is and always do what’s right, he warns him that he has to hide his true self. Again, shades of X-Men, which I always read as a reversal of the Superman story. While classic Superman is a wonder of assimilation, cheered and welcomed by humanity for his differences, the X-Men are feared and suspected for their differences, and in Man of Steel’s revision, Superman is not only an alien but alienated.

Christopher Nolan co-wrote and produced the film, and he brings his rebooted Batman sensibilities to the project—Superman is dark and brooding, not just orphaned, like Batman, but orphaned twice, by both Jor El and Jonathan Kent. Before long, General Zod’s mean-shaped head is back and threatening to TAKE OVER THE WORLD, at which point the movie takes its cues from War of the Worlds, down to the giant tripods, and Cloverfield and other 9/11/2001-infleunced films, all shaky handcams and masses of people fleeing the dust, wreckage, and debris of falling buildings. Meanwhile, a Transformers-like cityscape CGI battle ensues for, I don’t know, like an hour. Superman wins! Yay! And kisses Lois Lane, even though Metropolis looks like it was hit by a hundred 9/11s. No matter. In the final scene, the Clark Kent we know and love—glasses!—shows up in a miraculously restored Metropolis (although it took over a decade to put up a single new tower in Ground Zero), and we’re ready for the next adventure.

Martians! I mean, Kryptonians!

Look. I don’t want to be a jerk here. But I took my boys, ages 11 and 15, to see this movie, hoping for—for what? The way I felt when I saw Superman with Christopher Reeve, I guess. Or Star Wars, or Indiana Jones, or the many movies that I can honestly say felt like a formative childhood experience. I’m not one to wax nostalgic.[5] And there’s nothing exactly wrong with the picture, as the discrepancy between the fan ratings (largely positive) and critics’ reviews (negative to lukewarm) suggest. But in borrowing from, let’s recap here, Avatar, Star Wars, Alien, X-Men, Hulk, Smallville, Batman, War of the Worlds, Cloverfield, and whatever I left out, director Zak Snyder and Nolan seem profoundly embarrassed by Superman himself. Superman thrives on the dramatic irony of Clark Kent’s nebbishy persona, the one that Reeve did so well, the one that is as absent here as Superman himself is. We know who he really is, and we’re special for it. But there is no Clark Kent here, and no Superman. Nolan’s Batman movies got to the core of that character, a man pushed by tragedy to the brink of psychosis, living in a noir nightmare, neurotically and impotently trying to avenge and atone for his parents’ deaths. But Superman is not Batman, and Man of Steel does not get to the core of Superman. In trying to reboot him, it abandons what I liked about the character–his contrasting personas, his simplicity, his good nature, his fun. It should be awesome to be Superman. We don’t need to learn that [spoiler?] he himself is somehow responsible for luring Zod to Earth, or [spoiler x2?] not saving Jonathan, that he struggles with who he is, that humans fear him. (The only human who used to fear Superman was Lex Luthor.) In the end, Man of Steel is a perfectly adequate summer special effects extravaganza. It is not Superman. Which is a shame.

Like this:

For some people, it’s Bambi. For my brother Al, it was ET and Pee Wee’s Playhouse—he must have had a psychic intuition about that Pee Wee Herman guy. But everyone can look back on childhood and recall—sometimes fondly reminisce, as I suppose I do —about the Movies that Ruined Their Lives. (In the comments, go ahead and mention the movies that traumatized you. It’s fun!) It’s not that I hate the movies or think that they’re bad. As Facebook would say of my relationship, it’s complicated.

1) The Shining

I remember the day that Brendan, Michael, and I watched The Shining at Irving’s house, I guess at some point in elementary school. Irving had the only VHS and, obviously, most neglectful parents. I think they were going through something. Supposedly, kids figure everything out and know what’s going on, but I was a confused, oblivious child. Danny, the boy with the title’s power, seemed roughly our own age, and when he talked to his hand decades before talk shows would emplore people to do the same, and called his pointer finger Tony, then spoke in a raspy voice as Tony, it didn’t seem funny, or campy, or kitschy, or cheap. It was fucking horrifying. So was the “REᗡЯUM” in lipstick on the bathroom door, which spelled out “MURDƎЯ” in the mirror, something that at 10 years old (maybe?) I DID NOT SEE COMING AT ALL. And that was nothing compared with the terrifying twin dead ghost girls. Like regular twins aren’t scary enough. And of course, the Naked Lady in the bathtub, who begins as beautiful (not that I noticed; see: oblivious) and turns into a shrieking, droopy-breasted hag as she chases Jack Nicholson down one of the million hallways in the film. The later scenes, involving Jack going crazy, hacking poor Scatman Crothers to death with an ax, and subsequently menacing and attempting to murder his wife and child, had little effect after the powerful childhood magic of Tony, REᗡЯUM, the girls, and especially the Naked Lady. Either that or I had no more unconscious recesses left in my brain the ruin. As Psycho must have done for a previous generation, The Shining made me scared to go anywhere near a bathroom for, like, a year. And for many years after, Michael and I would yell “Naked Lady!” to each other, a phrase which for other kids may have evoked laughter, or titillation. Bur for us it was like screaming Boo! Times a million.

I watched The Shining again about a decade later. I was an English major in college and wanted to see what all the fuss in my head had been about. This time, the movie was hilarious, a black comedy about writer’s block and isolation, less about Danny and bathrooms than Jack Nicholson’s madcap persona and the ridiculous haunted house conventions that had been beaten into everyone’s heads a hundred times by then. A hotel built on an Indian burial ground? Really? I laughed at the film, at Jack, at Jack’s stupid, frozen face at the end, and myself, for misreading the movie so badly.

And then I watched it again about six years ago. I was teaching a class about conspiracy and paranoia in literature and film and wanted to pair Diane Johnson’s excellent, underrated novel The Shadow Knows with a movie. And it was scary all over again, for new reasons. This time, I hardly saw anything supernatural or monstrous about it. Instead, it seemed a harrowing psychodrama about loss of masculinity and domestic abuse, the not- at-all-funny ways in which women and children are most threatened by, most likely to be murdered by, husbands and fathers, supposed protectors and providers. Without society or any kind of social arrangements, Jack has nothing to keep his rabid unconscious in check. I was disturbed all over again. Maybe I wasn’t as oblivious as I thought as a child.

2. The Fly

Not the 1950s Vincent Price classic, although I did see and love that movie as a child. No. In 1986, a few years after The Shining, I was at an in-between movie age and faced a choice: to see the Transformers (the cartoon movie that no one wants to talk about these days, featuring Orson Welles’s last role. Ah, cruel fate), or David Croneneberg’s remake of The Fly. Later in life, I’d grow to love many of Cronenberg’s films. Jeff Goldblum/Seth Brundle’s revolting and horrific transformation—no easy head-switcheroos here; the way Brundle snaps a man’s wrist arm-wrestling in a bar; the way the mutated Brundle-Fly uses his fly vomit to disintegrate a man’s limbs; the way Gina Davis’s push dislodges Brundle-Fly’s jawbone and with it, his last vestige of human resemblance; Brundle-Fly’s like-nothing-else-ever appearance at the very end, after he accidently goes through the teleporter alone, failing in his Shining-esque plan to use the machine to merge his own DNA with Gina’s and their in-utero child, and how he points the gun at his own head but in his hideously deformed state can’t pull the trigger and Gina has to do it for him. OH MY GOD. I can’t believe I ever saw another movie again. Or slept again. Or had children. But YOU WILL NEVER GET ME IN A TELEPORTER. This plot summary was written from memory and without IMDB or Wikipedia. Although I have not seen this movie in over 25 years, its images are burned into the internal plasma screen of my psyche. Unlike The Shining, I do not expect to see The Fly again.

3. The Elephant Man

Now, here’s the catch: not only have I not seen the Elephant Man since I was a child; I NEVER saw The Elephant Man. Although I added to my Netflix queue over a year ago in a failed attempt to cure myself through immersion therapy. Which counts for something, I guess. Even before The Shining, I saw a short clip of The Elephant Man on TV. The clip I saw, which, again, I remember vividly although it was over three decades ago, features John Merrick, as he was known in the film, wearing a pillowcase over his head and fleeing a mob, which rips his mask off only to shock themselves into stunned murmurs. Suddenly emboldened, Merrick bellows, “I am not animal! I am a man! A human being!” before collapsing from the exertion. Then I saw a Ripley’s Believe it nor Not (or something like that) episode featuring Elephant Man reenactments, although the disfiguring makeup was far cruder than the film’s and, if I remember right, kinda purple. No matter. I become obsessed with The Elephant Man, reading all I could about him while strenuously avoiding any pictures of him, or John Hurt in the movie, which was not easy. Even at the time, I had no idea what I was scared of. Was I going to run into him somewhere? I was kind of scared that I would, although obviously the odds of, say, being killed by Jack Nicholson were far greater. Would I turn into him? Um, no. I didn’t know what I was scared of. I still don’t, although the fact that I felt terrorized and traumatized by the clip is, as far as I can ascertain without having actually seen it, the exact opposite point of the film itself, which seeks to re-humanize, rather than dehumanize, the Man, not the Elephant. I should really watch it.

But I won’t.

Honorable Mention: Snoopy Come Home. In 1976, Snoopy, one of my childhood loves, ran away from Charlie Brown. Or something like that. Did he run away, or was he left behind? Was it a misunderstanding? If you need to know, go check Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snoopy,_Come_Home , which, unbelievably, has a significant entry on it. I haven’t seen this one again and don’t plan to. And unlike the others, I hardly remember it. Call it traumatic amnesia. All I know is that Snoopy was gone for like an hour and a half, and everyone is crying and crying and crying those big Peanuts teardrops from the sides of their eyes like water hoses, and then five minutes before the end, after everyone gives up, Snoopy Comes Home and it’s all OK. Well, Charles Schultz, it WAS NOT OK. The ending could not fix the feelings of loss that, when I close my eyes and psychically look back, I may not have yet gotten over.

For a writer whose first novel is about a filmmaker, whose most recent novel is a hybrid story and film criticism, who cites Godard as an influence, and whose magnum opus pays homage to Eisenstein, Don DeLillo has not gotten his due at the movies. Cormac McCarthy gets the Coen brothers, Viggo Mortensen, and Matt Damon, but White Noise and Underworld elicit only confusion: students get excited to hear the books’ names, only to discover disappointedly they are entirely unrelated to the movies that share those titles. DeLillo’s novels feature neither ghosts nor vampires.

Until 2012, of course—the movie, and the monsters. Cosmopolis was released in theaters last fall and on DVD in January 2013, to the delight of DeLillo’s fans and apparent dismay of Robert Pattinson’s, according to these (typical) Amazon.com reviewers: “As much as I like Robert Pattinson, this was the worst movie I’ve ever watched. Wanted to throw away DVD afterward.” And this: “I love Robert Pattinson. … I loved all the Twilight movies… but Cosmopolis is … not a movie so much as a long nightmare in which every word is measured and every character represents something heavy…. Even Pattinson, who is very handsome in his business suit, isn’t enough to make me want to watch this again.”

Even for DeLillo’s readership, Cosmopolis is a strange first adaptation, a language-bound and seemingly unfilmable novel, especially compared with the black comedy of White Noise, which supposedly attracted director Barry Sonnenfeld before disappearing and being removed from IMDB, with only Wikipedia (!) aware that an adaptation was ever a possibility. The eminently filmable Libra was famously optioned by Oliver Stone, who then shelved it in favor of that other JFK conspiracy book. The less realistic one.

On the other hand, the plot of Cosmopolis always struck me as similar to the one DeLillo film that did make it—Game 6, written by DeLillo and starring Michael Keaton, who was also in the non-DeLillo White Noise film. (Everything is connected.) At the time, Game 6 struck me as compressed DeLillo miscellany—Mao II’s author/reader dynamics, White Noise’s SIMUVAC, and of course Underworld’s mediation on the meaning of loss, in baseball as in life. Now, though, Game 6 seems more of a blueprint for the future Cosmopolis than a retrospective. I find myself returning to Game 6’s cross-town New York City long day’s journey into night, its Pinter-esque dialogue between driver and troubled passenger who happens to be toting a loaded gun, as so many of DeLillo’s protagonists do, less as Chekov’s symbol of narrative economy as much as DeLillo’s favored way of propelling the plot deathward.

Cosmopolis, though, the book and the movie, is a far greater achievement than Game 6. As Cornel Bonca begins in his brilliant essay “Contact With the Real: On Cosmopolis,” when the novel “first came out in 2003, it was regarded by most reviewers, myself included, as a disappointment,” but he rightly concludes that the film may give “renewed life and attention to a novel that tells us more about this culture’s hurl into the future than we want to know.” And indeed, the film does tremendous justice to the novel’s ideas, criticisms, but especially, for me, its sub-zero sense of humor, including Kozmo on Brutha Fez’s death: “Hope you’re not disappointed…. That our man wasn’t shot. Hope he didn’t let you down. Natural causes. That’s a letdown” (132), or Vija Kinsky, on time, technology, and language: “Even the word computer sounds backward and dumb” (104). Director and adapter David Cronenberg seems an obvious partner. His concern with technology is pervasive, including films like Videodrome, but Cronenberg’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s Crash demonstrates that, like DeLillo, in too many scenes to name, Cronenberg has had a particular ambivalence toward the automobile. Cosmopolis, then, coalesces the DeLillian—and maybe American—obsessive trinity of money, guns, and cars.

Unlike those Amazon.com reviewers, I loved the movie. I was riveted, and I laughed out loud in ways that embarrassed me in front of only myself. But for me the surprise, and brilliance, was in casting Robert Pattinson. Bonca suggests that Christian Bale, “whose imposing physicality and cruel intelligence[,] would have been perfect for Eric Packer.” Of course. But the American Psycho-era Bale that Bonca envisions has turned into Terminator Salvation-era, Dark Knight Rises-era Bale—an action hero, or anti-hero, but either way a method-acting master and big budget Leading Man, too physically imposing, ironically too well cast, for the ethereal weirdness of DeLillo’s prose and Cronenberg’s vision. Pattinson’s casting reminds me of David Fincher’s at-the-time risk of with Brad Pitt in Fight Club: Pitt, like Pattinson, seemed less in keeping with the adaptation’s social satire and more like the thing the film was satirizing. Yet instead, like Pitt, Pattinson brings an artless, rather than method, quality to the part—his ready-to-wear materialism and superficiality are neither teeny bopper nor ironic, but rather, perfect. He even seemed out of control and frightened by the end, which works better than Bale’s perpetual imperturbability or even DeLillo’s paper Packer, who never loses his icy cool.

Pattinson fans hoping for a love story, or even a story, certainly set themselves up for disappointment. What DeLillo, Cronenberg, and Pattinson deliver is film’s most scathing critique of techno-capitalism in decades. And once again, DeLillo comes off as the most prescient guy in the room, forecasting the possibility that a single hubristic day trader could threaten the entire global financial system, or even that a grassroots 99% movement could occupy New York—ideas that seemed unlikely in the shadow of 9/11 when the novel came out. With its references to Marx (“A specter is haunting the world—the specter of capitalism!” [89, 96]), Cosmopolis positions Packer as the uncanny embodiment of Marx’s infamous monster metaphor: “Capital is dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” Pattinson/Packer is that ghost, and that vampire. Awake all night, pacing his urban Gothic castle, perpetually prowling for food and sex, preternaturally smart, hiding behind sunglasses and in his cork-lined, hearse-like automobile, Pattinson carries his Twilight fame readymade into Packer. As Vija Kinsky explains to Eric, “People will not die. Isn’t this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information” (104). And at the end of the film, as Paul Giamatti’s Benno Levin holds the gun to Packer’s head and the film abruptly cuts to black, Packer is left suspended between life and death, undead, the final moment of the murder never to arrive.

Packer may not be Edward Cullen or sparkle in the sunlight, but I know a true vampire when I see one. Cosmopolis may not be White Noise or Underworld (the movies, that is), but at last DeLillo has his ghost and vampire.

He’s so sparklie!

Hourman Update: The blog is still on hiatus, but I wanted to crosspost this piece with the Don DeLillo Society Newsletter, Vol 7 no 1, March 2013. I expect Hourman to return, in slightly different form, in a few months. Thanks to everyone who has been interested.

Despite that it needs no wordplay to be turned into its inevitable porn version, The Dark Knight Rises—subject of my last blog—simply cannot compete with its predecessor, The Dark Knight. And I think at this point it’s a truism that the second of the series is, in general, the best.[i] The best of the Star Wars movies is The Empire Strikes Back. The best of the Lord of the Rings Movies is The Two Towers. Spider-Man was great; Spider-Man II is better. X-Men is great; X2 is, if not better, pretty spectacular in ways that X1 was not. The same can be said of Terminator and Terminator 2. Most people prefer Aliens, with its almost unheard of 100% Rotten Tomatoes approval, to Alien (with its mere 97%)[ii]. Toy Story II is better than I and III. Few people have seen Mad Max, but everyone knows Mad Max II: The Road Warrior; Silence of the Lambs was technically a sequel to some movie that I didn’t see and am too apathetic to even Google. Even going back to the Cambrian Age of sequels, the 1970s, Superman II is better than the original, and Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan far surpasses Star Trek: Look, It’s a Movie Now, which I do not remember at all.

A sneaky way to get the word “Two” into the sequel. Yet Three Kings is not the next movie and is an entirely different film. Hmmm.

Yes, these are all genre movies, but so what? I’m sorry that Citizen Kane II: Rosebud’s Revenge, was never completed at the time of Orson Welles’s demise, when he died of embarrassment after voicing the original Transformers movie. (Its non-sequels, Transformers I and II, mess with my title, as they are equally terrible.)

But even the best of the non-superhero, non-sci-fi Godfather movies was still Godfather 2. Why?

The second film, the first sequel, especially when envisioned as a trilogy, tends to be the deepest, darkest, and most adventurous. Screenwriting conventional wisdom says that it’s the middle of the story that’s supposed to be the hardest part to write. The opening sets things up, the ending wraps them up, but how do you take the characters from their dramatic situation’s conflict to their ending’s resolution? It’s why so many movies feature the long chase scene in the middle—they’re running from the beginning to the end.

But in the second film, you can see how well writers and directors do when they are freed from what turns out to be the tyranny, the narrative straightjacket, of beginnings and endings. Every beginning is the same: establish characters. Establish situations. All well and good, and as Americans we seem particularly obsessed with origins. But there’s not a lot of room for creative maneuver.

The end provides a little more room. There’s happy—conflict resolved! It all worked out! There’s sad—conflict resolved, but a character, or the relationship, died! There’s bittersweet—a character, but not the main one, and probably a dog, died, but the main character learned a valuable lesson! There’s the non-ending ending, and the recursive we’re back at the beginning ending.

But the middle! Ahh. The middle is the sweet, sweet cream between the hard cookies of beginning and ending. And it’s made of pure, delicious conflict.

Take Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s opportunity to shine. He tried to shake the narrative shackles of beginnings and endings in Memento, and came close. He later figured out a way to use frame devices and plots in plots to mess around with beginnings and endings in Inception. But Dark Knight allows him to take the narrative gloves off and provide nothing but climaxes for two and half hours. Unlike Batman Begins, Dark Knight Rises, and most adventure movies, DK completely eschews the three act structure or even the Aristotelian conventions of plot and action.

Get your mind out of the gutter, people.

It’s a cliché, but Dark Knight’s narrative arc really is like a roller coaster–build up, rush down, build up, rush down, repeat. The opening establishes the Joker = up! Then there’s a party or something = down/building up. Batman flies in Hong Kong to capture that guy = up! Then lots of other stuff with equal signs and ups and downs that’s kinda boring in summary (read it here if you want to, although Wikipedia does not supply the equal signs) but that includes what feel like multiple false endings and climaxes again and again—Bruce is gonna reveal his secret! Lt. Gordon is dead! (For a while.) Batman’s gonna kill the Joker! But he can’t! He captures him! But the movie isn’t even close to being over—the Joker escapes via that horrific scene with the cellphone in that guy’s stomach! Then Rachel gets killed and Harvey Dent becomes Two Face! God, I’m getting out of breath, and I’m just typing. Then Joker threatens to blow up a hospital! Then he DOES blow up the hospital! Then the hostages are dressed as clowns and Batman has to fight a whole SWAT team to stop them from killing the wrong people! Then there’s Two Face, then the Joker, andthenBatmansomemore, and Gordon’s not dead but Two Face is going all Sophie’s Choice on Gordon and his family, then Two Face is dead and Batman is all running away and he like takes the fall AND THE TWO NOTE SOUNDTRACK MUSIC GETS LOUD AGAIN—Daaaaaaaa! DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!—AND IT’S SUDDENLY OVER! Also, somewhere in there Joker makes a pencil disappear and also creates another Liar’s Dilemma by giving those two boats detonators that may or may not detonate their own vs the other one’s boat, and I don’t even remember when that happened and Wikipedia forgot about it but IT WAS THERE.

It’s an exhausting but brilliant movie. When I saw it in the theater, my wife’s contact lens actually fell out of her eye because she had not blinked for so long. It felt like it was never gonna end, in a good and a bad way, and I felt shaken by it for at least a day.

And if you prefer, you can use Kurt Vonnegut’s plot graph. He’s less interested in charting the action than in the character’s good of ill fortune. In this case, Batman has nothing but ill fortune from beginning to end.

Batman Begins and then Dark Knight Rises are more narratively conventional, because they have to be. BB, as the title straightforwardly tells us, begins the Batman myth once again, if with some revision. DKR works hard to pull together the loose strands of BB and DK, so that the Ra’s al Ghul and Harvey Dent plotlines connect. DK, though, is nothing but middle. You can say the same things about many of the movies I listed in the opening—freed from the necessity of telling, or in many cases, retelling, the foundations, and freed from the need to wrap the story up in a tidy closing bow, those movies can provide murky thrills without any final sugarcoating—Han is frozen in carbonite, Luke gets the worst news of his life and is symbolically castrated by his new father, and the Empire has, um, struck back. The Fellowship has separated and, individually, faced to worst fight of their lives—but they now realize that the worst is really still ahead of them. Godfather II—and, perhaps amazingly to say in the same sentence, Spider-Man 2 and X2—use their predecessors to deepen what we already know about the characters, or develop what previously were mere glimpses of backstory, or to provide dramatic irony for the audience, as when Ripley is ASSURED by that dickhead Paul Reiser that there are no such thing as aliens, or in Terminator 2, to pull disparate and unlikely continuities together in satisfying compositions.

Every summer it’s the same movie critic’s crisis: originality good, sequels bad. But when critics lament yet another summer of sequels, they’re missing the vast narrative possibility that lies in the middle of things.

Time: 90 minutes! I really need to get my time back down.

[i] I am not counting cash-in made for DVD retreads, so don’t throw, say, Lion King II: Simba’s Pride back at me, OK?

I had no idea that I knew the actor from Inception and Warrior. Yes, there’s the new bulk, the shaved head, and the costume. But mostly, I didn’t recognize him because of the headgear. And the mask has raised the ire of two of my favorite movie critics. Anthony Lane writes in the New Yorker that “Bane wears a crablike mask over the lower part of his face—a disastrous burden for Tom Hardy, whose mouth, sensual and amused for such a tough customer, is his defining feature. Via this device, Bane declaims his bold, anarchic sentiments; at least, I think they were anarchic. Given that I could make out barely a third of them, he may well have been reciting from ‘Clifford the Small Red Puppy.’

Hardy obviously put an enormous amount of work into preparing for the role, bulking up his body and developing a strange, swooping voice that promises to give rise to a thousand late-summer Bane impersonations. But the choice to clamp a leather-and-metal mask over 60 percent of Hardy’s face for the entire movie means that, for all practical purposes, the actor’s diligent iron-pumping was in vain. Since we can’t tell whether the person producing that sound actually resides in that body or not, Nolan might as well have cast an already-huge body double and just had Hardy dub in the voice. Most of all, though, the mask is a mistake because we never get a good look at Bane’s face. With nothing to work with but a pair of darting eyes, Hardy can’t endow Bane with motivation enough to make him more than a generic bogeyman.

Of course. It makes sense. And yet, I can’t help but think that Bane’s mask makes a perfect visual and symbolic foil to Batman’s cowl—and scowl. This blog entry’s opening image, one of the most common promo shots, depicts the contrast and symmetry perfectly: Bane’s face is a kind of negative, a reverse mirror image, of Batman’s; what is exposed on Batman—the mouth, the jaw, the chin—is concealed on Bane. Batman’s head and eyes are disguised, whereas Bane’s are open. Batman’s guttural voice is an affectation; Bane’s is the real result—in a major revision of the comicbook character—of the mask he cannot remove without dying. When we first meet Bane at the beginning of the movie, he is hooded, but removing one mask only reveals another. Covering the mouth, even more than the eyes as the source of his humanity, forces Hardy to act entirely kinesthetically; together with Batman’s costume and mask covering 95% of his own body, the choreographed fight scenes, seemingly graphic, instead become a version of Japanese Noh drama, where the masks themselves embody the characters’ distinctiveness and personalities, freeing the actors to use their bodies, rather than their faces, as their sole vehicles of expression. When Bane finally breaks Batman, his final humiliation is removing Batman’s mask. In doing so, he does not reveal Batman’s true identity—he takes it from him.

All of the faces of the Dark Knight movies have been masks. The face of Harvey Dent—Two Face—is crucial to the new film, in that Gotham is presented only with his good side, his dark side hidden, an omission that Commissioner Gordon and Batman consider a necessary fiction but one that inevitably is revealed. Two Face is like Bane, a reversal of Batman’s face, but divided exactly vertically rather than horizontally. His perfect split represents both his fractured psyche and his Manichaeism, a division that proves unstable within himself as well as Gotham.

Bane’s mask-in-a-mask revelation was also used to introduce Heath Ledger’s Joker in the previous movie—one clown mask removed to reveal another beneath it. But unlike Batman, even unlike Bane, who gets a few seconds of backstory revealed in the end, the Joker has no secret face, and no secrets. His mask is his face and his face is his mask; he is exactly as he appears to be as well as a complete walking fiction. He is his own shadow, his own mask.

And what I thought from the advance images to be Catwoman’s mask turned out to be her goggles flipped up onto her head, the only whimsical, lighthearted mask in the film. Cat suit and cat burglar aside, Selina Kyle of Dark Knight Rises is not the comic’s Catwoman at all, not even in name, as “Catwoman” is never said. She wears a the thief’s domino mask seemingly to hide her self, but we discover that the one thing she truly desires is to be free of her identity, not to protect it at all.

But what lies behind Christopher Nolan’s mask? What is his political ambition? His artistic aspiration for the films seem clear enough: big sound and bigger spectacle. But Batman himself, like the Riddler, remains an enigma: a hero and an anti-hero; a cautionary tale of unchecked, out of control ego—Super Ego!—but also the need for order; the 1% given everything but also the self-made man; a right-wing borderline fascist or a left-wing critique of same. The film blows up Gotham City, looking more like New York than Chicago this time around, continuing the previous film’s imagery of 9/11. Police officers are trapped beneath rubble; we see a geographically vague Middle East and detention centers. The film seems to reference the War on Terror, Occupy Wall Street, the language of homegrown class warfare and New World Order conspiracy, symbolic pits with real walls to be scaled, the French Revolution, Kafka-esque (or Lewis Carroll-esque?) courts, a Fight Club-like Project Mayhem no longer content to blow up empty buildings, and a genuine allusion to Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. But what does any of it mean?

Now that Lucius Fox has granted Batman “The Bat,” a great chiropteran hovercraft, we finally have a way to begin grasping the Dark Knight trilogy’s political import: it is a series of what Claude Lévi-Strauss coined “floating signifiers,” and what Roland Barthes amended to a “floating chain of signifieds”—that is, like a mask itself, it means exactly, and only, what people see in it, whether everything, or nothing. And now, in the aftermath of the July 20 Aurora, Colorado, mass murder, the cinematic gunfire, mayhem, bloodshed, and masks (shooter James Holmes wore a gas mask during the massacre and had a Batman mask in his house when police searched it) inevitably take on darker new meanings.

Unfair? Of course. But Nolan’s brand of sustained ambiguity, something I am usually so quick to celebrate, has its own dark side.

Here’s William Butler Yeats’s poem, “The Mask”:

Put off that mask of burning gold

With emerald eyes.”

“O no, my dear, you make so bold

To find if hearts be wild and wise,

And yet not cold.”

“I would but find what’s there to find,

Love or deceit.”

“It was the mask engaged your mind,

And after set your heart to beat,

Not what’s behind.”

“But lest you are my enemy,

I must enquire.”

“O no, my dear, let all that be;

What matter, so there is but fire

In you, in me?”

Like Dark Knight Rises, it too is an exercise in sustained ambiguity, in the challenge of determining desire or deceit, who is a lover or an enemy, and what is or isn’t behind the mask. It seems to mean a lot of things, or, if poetry isn’t your thing, nothing. Yet one meaning that I take from it is the notion that we need to stop worrying about what’s behind each of our masks—that the face we put forward is our real face, even when it is just a mask. It sounds nihilistic, like the Joker. But it’s also, in many ways, all we really have. So perhaps Nolan’s sound and spectacle are all there is.

And they’re enough.

Time: 90 minutes. I knew this was going to be a long one before I started.

As much as I love superheroes, I can’t say that the new Amazing Spider-Man movie needs to exist. First, as long as it was being remade, time to drop the hyphen—just “Spiderman.” It’s cleaner. Second, the movie reminded me of seeing a high school play: “Aw! So cute! They’re doing Spider-Man!” When Sally Fields showed up as Aunt May, I thought, “Aw! There’s Sally Fields pretending to be Aunt May!” And then when Martin Sheen showed up as Uncle Ben, I thought,” Aw! There’s Martin Sheen! I love that guy!” before quickly remembering that he’s a dead man walking, to be gunned down before the second act ended so Peter could learn his lesson about power and responsibility. This must have been how medieval audiences reacted to seeing Jesus-Christ show up in the passion plays: “I can’t believe he’s gonna get killed AGAIN.”

But crucially, the movie revises, updates, and, for many fans, corrects what turned out to be a huge comic controversy of the 2002 Spider-Man.

This is a BFD. When Spider-Man (hyphen for historical accuracy) debuted in 1962, bitten by a radioactive spider, proportionate strength and speed etc etc etc, he invented the synthetic webbing and pressure-sensitive webshooters himself:

Peter Parker as misfit, scientist, and genius is crucial to the early stories. It’s not enough to get spider powers. Much of his early success as a hero stems from the use of his pre-bite intellect and his own diligence and hard work, as opposed to mere accident: “So they laughed at me for being a bookworm, eh? Well, only a science major could have created a device like this!” And so his identification with his audience of bookworms is complete. Spider-Man, as Stan Lee, in his usual overwrought, avuncular, carnival barker voice, introduced him earlier, is a hero like… You! So he needs to have something comic readers can pride themselves in having; Spiderman is about smarts and perseverance, not just a lab accident. Later comics elaborated upon the original idea:

But while 1962 Peter Parker, as a non-sidekick, picked-on teen, was unlike any of the other superheroes of that time—more like, of course, a stereotypical comics reader—he was also very much like most of the other 1960s heroes who believed in Better Living Through Chemistry. Sputnik had been launched a few years earlier, the Space Race was on, kids began working with their chemistry sets in their rooms, and comics followed, whether to embrace the post-war American dream or just because the hero/scientist opened up new character and narrative possibilities. Until that point, THE SCIENTISTS HAD ALL BEEN BAD GUYS! Suddenly, Professor X (who had to open his own school to receive tenure, apparently) , bald and in a wheelchair just a Superman’s first supervillian Ultra-Humanite (hyphen?), looking like Lex Luthor, was leading the X-Men! Reed Richards took the Fantastic Four into space, then into crime-fighting! Bruce Banner started off as a nuclear gamma physicist before going green as Hulk. Over at DC, the Flash’s Barry Allen—usually thought of as ushering in the Silver Age—was reimagined as a police scientist; the new Green Lantern was test pilot/astronaut proxy Hal Jordan, whose power ring (two words) got a science fiction makeover from the previous incarnation’s magic origin. Spiderman’s invention put him in the center of the new wave of super science police.

Forward forty years later for the first big film, though, for a changed world. The idea that teenaged Peter Parker could invent the webs himself suddenly didn’t seem realistic. The dream that the brilliant kid his bedroom could do what millions of dollars in government and industrial research and development couldn’t? Ridiculous. Just as important, the early 2000s saw a sudden upswing of anti-technology cultural forces—technophobia brought to the surface by Y2K, a wave of anti-factory farming, the Fight Club-style anger at the techno-corporate world, left-wing distrust of surveillance and electronic voting machines, and right-wing fears of a technologically driven New World Order. Stan Lee and Steve Ditko had devoted all of two panels for Peter to invent the webshooters. Could a multimillion dollar movie really be that casual and still be credible? So the webs became a part of Spiderman’s new powers, his body generating them organically, leaving the film open to hundreds of snarky commentators noting that spiders don’t fashion webs from, um, that part of their anatomy. Taken together, we see a nice example of Samuel Coleridge’s famous dictum about suspension of disbelief: audiences could suspend disbelief long enough to imagine that a bite from a radioactive genetically altered[i] spider could spontaneously generate natural webshooters , but not that Peter Parker could have invented the ‘shooters himself—broke, without a lab, and alone in his Queens bedroom. The dream of technological progress was over.

My hands are making what?

But only for a decade. Today, Andrew Garfield, playing Tobey Maguire playing Peter Parker, indeed invents his webshooters again, like Kennedy’s in the White House and it’s 1962. Yet unlike Classic Peter, he doesn’t quite invent them by himself. While it’s all a little hazy (damn you, montage!), what Nu Peter seems to do is closer to what contemporary techies get. Instead of opening his chemistry set, he draws from preexisting technologies—some prefab Oscorp tensile-strength web fluid here, some, um, other mechanical movie-looking parts and gears and awesome LEDs and stuff that looks like machinery there. 2002 was too soon to imagine the day when every kid would not just own a smart phone—as Peter plays games on his phone to kill time while waiting for the Lizard to emerge in the sewer—but that more than a few teens would also be savvy enough to jailbreak them, invent their own apps, and create original graphic art, digital music, and code, alone in their rooms. The basement chemistry sets of the early 1960s have given way to the new tech mythos of Steve Jobs in his garage, not inventing the computer but rather remaking and improving it based on previous iterations of the same ideas that Xerox and IBM used but somehow didn’t really get. C. 2012 Peter’s genius isn’t that he invents the webbing and webshooter a la 1962, but rather that he recognizes that the technology for them already exists, and he makes them work together. Only a science major post-millennial could have created a device like this. We love technology again, but in a remix, mashup, sampling, collage kinda way.

So it’s fitting that, in the Tobey Maguire version, Natural-webbing Spidey fights techno-corporate Green Goblin/Norman Osborne, who relies on the worst of tech R&D: metal mask and body armor, disintegration grenades, and deadly projectiles; in Spiderman II, Doctor Octopus recalls the 1940s and 50s Scientist Gone Wrong, becoming a crazed metal-armed cyborg, while again Natural-webbing Spidey has to set him right and destroy the dangerous incursion of technology into the human realm. Lots of other fantasy movies of the early 2000s shared this pro-natural, anti-tech spirit: The Lord of the Rings pits the sylvan elves and pastoral hobbits against Sauromon’s metal hammers, metal towers, bio-engineered monsters, and willful destruction of trees. In those Harry Potter movies, technology is shunted aside entirely, unable to coexist with magic at all. In Phantom Menace, those stupid Jar Jar-looking aliens use natural weapons… ah, I can’t even continue; I hate that movie so much.[ii]

Yes, the Lizard is a bit of a retread of Doc Ock, in that he’s a scientist whose attempt to do good results in the potential destruction of New York again, his mind altered by a biotech-transformation. But when Dr. Connors emerges transformed into the Lizard, he sheds his lab coat and his humanity, symbolically and visually the worst kind of natural—slimy, scaly, swampy, primitive, lizard brained. New Tech Spidey is web savvy (har har) and smart, using his—and Gwen Stacey’s—head to configure a quickie technological solution to New York City’s new alligators in the sewer problem. OK, technology may have created the problem, but, unlike earlier incarnations of superheroism, technology can also solve it. Call it Web 2.0.

So when the techno-pendulum swings back, expect to see some other new version of the webshooters for the inevitable 2022 reboot. And when we do, will someone please get Uncle Ben a bullet-proof vest this time?

Or the cynical explanation: you can’t sell organic webshooter toys.

Time: 90 minutes. Over, but this piece is pretty long, and I even spent at least 10 minutes cutting tangents. Plus I managed not to make any Marc Webb (!!!) puns. It’s also funny that my conclusion—2000s Spider-Tobey is natural and fights techno-bad guys, while 2012 Spider-Garfield is technological and fights a natural bad guy—came to me in my sleep two nights ago. Call me 24-Hour Man.

[i] The radioactivity concomitant with the early ‘60s Cold War was replaced by new wishes and fears of genetic modification for the 2000s. But that, Dear Reader, is the subject for another exciting post! Excelsior!

[ii] Irony alert: these seemingly anti-technology movies could not have existed without their recent advances in digital technology.

It’s twelve years after the millennium, and even more since anyone thought much about Perestroika or the millennium as still approaching. But last week couldn’t have been a better time to have seen Angels in America. Despite having taught Tony Kushner’s masterpiece twice (or at least the first part, Millennium Approaches) and although I’ve seen the HBO adaptation again and again, I never thought I’d get to see the play AS a play—until the Stray Dog Theater in St Louis undertook performances of both parts. It’s a bold and difficult play to stage, but it couldn’t have been a better venue—Stray Dog performs in the Tower Grove Abbey, its arched ceiling, wooden pews, and stained glass windows creating a hyperreal, ethereal quality to seeing angels. And the 8 actors who took on all 32 roles were more than up to it. In many ways, the play is about ‘80s apocalypticism, although it wasn’t actually produced until the 1990s. Yet I want to emphasize that it works just as well now as it may have then—maybe even better.

Tower Grove Abbey

The play relies on the symmetry between two couples—Prior, struggling with his diagnosis of AIDS, and his lover Louis, struggling with Prior’s struggling with AIDS; the Mormon couple Harper, struggling against mental illness, and her husband Joe, struggling against his own repressed homosexuality. Prior wrestles angels; Harper wrestles inner demons. The live staging frequently features both couples on stage at the same time, taking turns acting their conflicts adjacently, literally in parallel. When reading—or even watching as a movie—we’re used to page breaks or camera cuts, naturally shifting our attention. But we can’t forget the other characters when they’re all still in front of our eyes, like watching doubles tennis. The HBO series’ introduction is all sky, swoops, and distance, but the enclosed play forces our attention strictly on the characters.

Students reading the play always fret about what they should take as real, fantasy, imagined, or hallucination. I always told them not to worry too much about it and just go with the play’s feeling and language. And seeing the play live confirms this sense that the supernatural elements—Prior and Harper somehow meet in their dream-slash-Valium induced delirium, respectively; the ghost of Ethyl Rosenberg shows up to haunt the other main character, Roy Cohn, based on the recently deceased (or he’d have no doubt sued) real-life Roy Cohn who, like Prior, has contracted AIDS—aren’t really meant to be puzzled over. Like so much of what’s strange or inexplicable in real life, they’re not even that mysterious. They just are.

Seeing the production live emphasized another crucial aspect of the play that’s easy to overlook or forget on the page, one that wasn’t a part of the film adaptation: for much of Part 1, whether he is part of the scene or not, Prior lies in his bed in the middle of the stage; for most of Part II, it is Roy. No matter what else is happening, the viewer is constantly reminded of the AIDS-stricken bodies that for most of the ‘80s seemed kept out of view, offstage. Similarly, in Part 1 Prior strips of his clothes for his medical examination; in Part II, Joe and Harper appear nude. In the movie, it seems standard issue celluloid skin. Mary Louis Parker’s Harper isn’t so different from Mary Louis Parker’s Nancy Botwin on Weeds, who is semi-clad semi-weekly. Yet when the actors strip in real time, in place, in person, it is another reminder of the way in which the roles themselves force the actors to bare all emotionally, and now physically, another way in which this play, angels to the contrary, is all about human bodies.

If you’re not familiar with the play, it may seem as though its emphasis on homosexuality, on the one hand, or religion, on the other, could be a turn off. In fact, when I went to IMDB for the blog’s opening image, its sidebar offered two Related Lists: one that featured the movie Doubt, and the other labeled Gay Interest. But media talking heads to the contrary, gay and religious themes aren’t necessarily on opposing hands at all, and the play is very much about love, and death, and the problems of being human, things I imagine that anyone can relate to.

But despite the play’s length, running over seven hours total, dialogue, which is often rapid-fire, and concomitant complexity, let’s even take its themes at face value. Even then, the last two weeks suggest that the play is not just of the 80s, or the 90s, or the millennium. We now have the first serious Mormon contender running for President, even as Angels is preoccupied with the ways in which Mormonism is America’s only home-grown religion, and perhaps all saints are now Latter Day. And less than two weeks ago, President Obama finally made his support for same-sex marriage clear.

In the play, Louis rails against what he sees as “the worst kind of liberalism, really, bourgeois tolerance, and what I think AIDS shows us is the limits of tolerance, that it’s not enough to be tolerated, because when the shit hits the fan, you find out just how much tolerance is worth. Nothing. And underneath all the tolerance is intense, passionate hatred.” In some ways, the scene is meant to stack the deck against Louis—he himself is hypocritical, overly cerebral, and self-indulgent, spouting polemics when in his personal life he has abandoned Prior. His conversation and sparring partner here is Belize, who replies to Louis’s page-length monologue with a dismissive “Uh huh.”

Yet I can’t help but wonder if Kushner nevertheless stands partially behind the sentiment, as perhaps now, with the millennium firmly behind us, we may as well. While it looks like once again gay marriage will be a culture war issue for the ballot box, it now seems as though endorsing it, rather than opposing it, may be the winning side on the issue. We can now see tolerance for what it is—not necessarily Nothing, but rather simply setting the bar too low, far too low, since to tolerate something suggests that we’ll put up with it, but nothing more.

Angels in America in 2012 suggests that we can move past tolerance to something better: equality.

You’d be forgiven for being confused. You must have been focused on the costumes, powers, special effects, and, um, I guess the superheroes. And OK, a plot summary makes it sound a lot like a superhero movie: a godlike megalomaniac in a ridiculous helmet obtains a magical object with an awesome name (the Tesseract! Because the hexadecachoron must have been busy), teams up with illegal aliens from another dimension, and tries to Take Over the World, or at least trash Manhattan by means of enormous metallic fantail shrimp, which I think I made the mistake of ordering once. Only The Avengers can stop him! But will they be able to set aside their differences in time?

Do you like my hat?No, I do not like that hat. Goodbye.

This last question is the one that occupies most of the film’s nearly two and a half hour running time, before the final act devolves into the humdrum Epic Battle for the Fate of the World that has served as the resolution to every sci fi and fantasy movie for decades. And it’s the one that makes The Avengers less of a superhero movie than a story of People from Diverse Categories Thrown into an Unlikely Situation who then Realize that they have A Lot in Common, or “PDCTUSRALC.” You know what, let’s skip the acronym on this one.

The genre has a great literary pedigree, going at least back to Boccaccio’s Decameron (if the Tesseract weren’t available, then Loki could have stolen The Decameron!) in the 14th century, before getting its English makeover in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales a few decades later. The Decameron featured ten assorted people stuck with each other after trying to escape the Black Death; Canterbury Tales involved a long pilgrimage to the shrine in Canterbury. But Chaucer really invented the notion that circumstances could bring together a set of unlikely travel companions as characters—a knight and squire; a merchant, miller, reeve, and cook; a prioress, friar, pardoner, and summoner; the uncategorizable Wife of Bath, and many others, including, it seems, a fictionalized version of Chaucer himself. The brilliance comes from the schisms and frictions created when people from different social types are forced into confines and conversation with one another.

The genre then takes off in different directions as we move to America in the 20th century. Characters telling their own stories in their own styles gets lost, but pilgrimages or enclosed spaces making strange companions flourished. On the one hand, you’ve got John Ford’s 1939 masterpiece Stagecoach, which finds the 1880s version of the pilgrimage in its title, throwing together a framed outlaw (John Wayne!), a prostitute (with a heart of gold, natch), an ambivalent sheriff, a drunk doctor, an uppercrust wife of an officer (with a secret!), a banker (with a secret!), a Confederate gambler (with a… ah, you know), and a few others. That they’re being menaced with massacre by Geronimo is less of a problem than their own internal conflicts within the coach. On the other hand, you have The Lord of the Rings, another quest that brings together unlikely travel companions and proves that hobbits and men, and even elves and dwarves, could learn to get along. Star Wars and the many other adventure stories pitting knights (Jedi or not), hotheads, princesses, mentors, and aliens against one another seem indebted equally to Chaucer, Ford, and Tolkien.

There’s of course Gilligan’s Island, with its assorted cast, although why the Howells are on the boat is one of the island’s many mysteries, considering that they could have bought and sold a fleet of Minnows.

And there’s that other island replete with mysteries, from Lost, where, in our modern version of the pilgrimage or the stagecoach, an airplane crash brings together the straight man, the hothead, the druggie, and the bad girl, along with novel additions: a pregnant woman, a prepubescent boy, a paraplegic (as we would discover), a couple that speaks no English (or so we thought), an older (interracial) couple, semi-incestuous step-siblings, an ex-Republican Guard Iraqi torturer, an obese bilingual schizophrenic (although supernatural explanations would supersede psychological ones), and many more.

Yet even Lost seemed modeled on another updated version of the Canterbury Tales: reality television, with its cast-to-clash archetypes. And even then, shows like The Real World—for me, the original reality premise from which all the others borrowed–seems less real than a copy of a movie that was supposed to be based on real life: The Breakfast Club.

Avengers Assembly!

Here’s the poster’s tagline:

They were five total strangers, with nothing in common, meeting for the first time. A brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel and a recluse. Before the day was over, they broke the rules. Bared their souls. And touched each other in a way they never dreamed possible.

So think of Avengers as the Canterbury Tales, with awesome weapons. Or Stagecoach, but on that awesome SHIELD flying aircraft carrier. Or The Breakfast Superheroes:

They were six strangers, with nothing in common. A billionaire genius philanthropist. A recluse with anger management problems. A gorgeous spy with a secret. An exchange student who excels at the hammer throw. An ROTC supersoldier who still knows what it’s like to be picked on. And Samuel L Jackson with an eyepatch.[i] Before it was over, they broke the rules. Bared their souls.

It turns out that my wife (who blogs about food here) has not been reading Hourman. She is worried that I have given away the end of The Hunger Games, which has been collecting dust on her nightstand for two weeks.

Yet is it really possible to give away the end of The Hunger Games? Once you read the back cover, or see a commercial for the movie, or have any idea what it’s about (hunger; also, games; possibly vice versa), and once you know that it’s part of a trilogy (see: inside cover) it seems impossible to give too much away, since it’s highly unlikely that Katniss can possibly be killed in the book. What do you think this is [Spoiler alert!], Game of Thrones?

But thanks to the Internet, we live in a perpetual No Spoiler culture, where the worst thing a website, blog, critic, or writer can do is reveal an important plot detail or, God forbid, the ending.

The issue, for me, is twofold.

First, time does not exist online. Not in the timesuck sense of murdering an hour on Facebook or, for me, looking longingly at lovely Les Pauls on Ebay, but rather in the contextless void of cyberspace, where all people, living or dead, and all music and video simultaneously coexist. Abba to Zappa, Beatles and Bach and Beck, are all just keywords, timeless—in the not necessarily classic sense.

Music doesn’t have spoilers, though. Yet with movies, there is no longer a statute of limitations for how long someone is supposed to wait before you’re Allowed to Talk about Fight Club, since it will always be brand new, eternally, online, to someone, somewhere. In other words, online writing, in its perpetual present, is expected to maintain the rhetoric of old media newspaper movie reviews, which essentially summarize the premise, or roughly the first act of a movie, with a little subjective commentary about whether the reader should see the movie or not, preferably with 1-5 stars as an EZ guideline.

This is very different from critical writing, college writing, and academic writing, where the presumed audience is someone who has (likely) read the book or seen the film in question and is interested in analysis, not a recommendation—and who already knows the twists and details. ‘Cause the thing is, I need to be able to discuss the work in its entirety to discuss it at all. The difference between The Lion King and Hamlet is the difference between the wayward Prince reclaiming his betrothed and kingdom, vs. everybody dying horribly. Possibly also: singing animals and fart jokes.

But this ethos contradicts the internet rule of No Spoilers, as seen here by one Amazon.com review, about—surprise!—a collection of critical essays on Fight Club:

This review is from: You Do Not Talk About Fight Club: I Am Jack’s Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection (Smart Pop series) (Paperback)

I love Fight Club in both book and movie form and I love the fact that the story makes you think. So picking this book up seemed like a must for any Fight Club/Chuck Palahniuk fan.

I’m only two essays into it and my interest is already losing traction. The first essay was painfully overwritten considering the context of the book and the audience who will probably be reading it. If you don’t have your dictionary and a good understanding of philosophy both basic and advanced, you’ll probably struggle through it hoping the book gets better as I did (it does). Long, complex sentence structures, insane words and hybrid words I recognized but didn’t know the meaning of and philosophy references that I had never heard before all conspired to ruin this first essay for me rather quickly.

Another major complaint I have–again with the first essay since I’ve only read two so far–is that there is no spoiler alert at the start of the essay. Well let me just warn you now, the first contributing essay will ruin a good majority of Chuck Palahniuk’s novels if you haven’t already read them. The author goes off endlessly and in detail about his theories on Chuck’s other books, describing in detail certain aspects of the story and the book’s overall outcome. So annoying trying to skip over stuff that seemed spoiler in nature. I haven’t read Chuck’s other books yet and now I don’t need to; the surprise is ruined.

The “first essay” in question was written by me. And I didn’t realize the possibility that what I was writing was “spoiler in nature.” I thought I was writing about books.

Leaving aside that this reviewer thinks it’s a problem to read an essay that uses words and philosophical references that he has “never heard of before” (JFGI, kid), I turn to the second issue: the No Spoiler fetish overemphasizes the importance of plot.

OK, maybe in fairness to my Amazon detractor, with a Chuck Palahniuk or an M. Night Shyamalan or a Quentin Tarantino—people who traffic specifically in the twist ending—you don’t want to know that at the end of Fight Club oirjrnjnriwbecbwqhjbediuwrenrfnewroin. Or at the end of The Sixth Sense it turns out that Bruce Willis’s character wfnwenfrewijgtmhoiweb, or at the end of Unbreakable, Bruce Willis’s character learns that lkjsfrohjdeoifhqwiuewqnbe, or at the chronological end but narrative middle of Pulp Fiction, Bruce Willis’s character oiewhfiunewicnbewfndekjwncen. These movies, like Bruce Willis, have been out for decades.

At what point is it safe to declare a Spoiler moratorium?

The thing is, there are many, many reasons to read or watch a story aside from the stuff that happens. If anything, Palahniuk’s, Shymalan’s, and Tarantino’s best work transcend plot entirely and enter into the much more interesting realms of style, voice, and narrative structure, aspects of storytelling that, like sweet, sweet honey, naturally resist spoilage. If all anyone wants is plot summary, go read Cliff’s Notes. Or if that’s too long, the Cliff’s Notes of Cliff’s Notes, Wikipedia. If someone likes an author, even the most egregious spoilers shouldn’t actually ruin (the word used twice in the review) much of anything.

Now, maybe this is too glib. After all, I suppose it’s the particular details of the plot, not the overall trajectory or ending, that rankles the Spoiler-sports (Alternate names for people who want to stop spoilers: the Refrigerators? The Tupperwares? Or are these just terrible band names?). For example, in Titanic, it’s not the boat, it’s that [Spoiler alert, despite that it’s the second highest grossing movie of all time] Jack dies; in Harry Potter [Spoiler alert, even though it’s the bestselling book series and third highest grossing movie of all time], the epilogue flashes forward to a future where Harry and Ginny are sending their bully magnet-named son Albus Severus to Hogwarts; in LoTR [Spoiler alert, even though—ah forget it], Frodo destroys the ring but is altered by the experience and can’t go back home; in The Empire Strikes Back [oh no he di’n’t], Luke is revealed to be Darth Vader’s son.

Once Target shirts have spoilers, the secret's out

I’ll go one further: I don’t like surprises. Let’s hear two cheers for spoilers. Once you’re free from the filmic tyranny of What’s Going to Happen?!?, you can actually sit back and enjoy the show.

So it turns out that Einstein was right: “The faster-than-light neutrino results, announced last September by the OPERA collaboration in Italy, was due to a mistake after all. A bad connection between a GPS unit and a computer may be to blame” (see story).

This means two things: check your cables, people.

And that time travel is impossible.

But don’t tell that to the movies, which never seem to tire of time travel. One of the best and most interesting time travel movies, Midnight in Paris, just won Woody Allen an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. I’m not sure people think of it as a time travel movie, exactly, because it defies the basic conventions of the genre. The trailer doesn’t even allude to the main plot point, making it seem like a standard rom-com:

In keeping, the film resolutely does not attempt to explain how or why writer Gil, played by Owen Wilson playing Woody Allen, winds up in the 1920s, meeting his literary and artistic idols like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Stein, Dali, and others. No flux capacitor-equipped DeLorean. No Klingon Bird-of-Prey that slingshots around the Sun. No Time Displacement Sphere. No black hole . No Time-turner. No damn time machine at all. (Thanks for keeping track, Metacritic.)

Gil does not fret that his actions will have any ripple or butterfly effects. He does not accidently kill his father, or flirt with his mother, or prevent his parents from marrying. He does not have to protect the woman who will give birth to the hero who battles against the robots except he winds up being that hero’s father. (So many Oedipal motifs!) No saving a hippogriff, or releasing zoo animals. Especially no goddamn whales. It’s something like magic, although only the trailer is stupid enough to use that word. It’s a fairly light, conflict-free film, especially given Allen’s recent foray into murder thrillers and never-ending absorption with death. Through the journey into the past, Gil understands something important about himself, his fiancé, and his writing: his loves, and his life. And it’s really a straightforward wish fulfillment, pure fantasy, for anyone nostalgic for a time they themselves have never known, anyone who imagines that there’s a golden age that they were born too late for. As Gil discovers at the end [spoiler alert!], no matter where, or when, you go, there’s always an even earlier golden age to romanticize.

Allen has done time travel before, though, in Sleeper, when Happy Carrot health-food store owner Miles ends up two hundred years in the future, only to discover that everything he thought was good for him is now known to be bad, and vice versa.

Yet food aside, things are not really better in the future, and not exactly worse, either, new technology to the contrary. But rather, humans, whenever and wherever, are still very much the same. Almost forty years later—or perhaps three hundred years earlier—Midnight in Paris suggests something similar: people have always been nostalgic, and scared, and hopeful, in the past as well.

Yet our fascination with time travel in movies does not wane. And that is because all movies are time travel movies. Bear with me.

Look at the two biggest winners from last night’s Academy Awards, The Artist and Hugo.

While neither literally features time travel, the time traveler is the viewer. Hugo, clearly thematically intertwined with Martin Scorsese’s own film preservation efforts, posits the idea that the camera itself is our time machine, capturing moments that we can then revisit each time we re-view—unless the film is lost or destroyed, taking with it our very history and key to the past. Keys, cameras, locks, and clocks all feature prominently throughout the movie, not to mention an actual Automaton itself, a kind of anthropomorphized metaphorical time machine that connects Hugo to his own past and serves as a plot point to take him to his future.

The Artist, which I confess I have not yet seen, even seems to go further: while Scorsese remade some of real-life filmmaker/character Georges Méliès work for Hugo, in general the 3D movie has a high tech, self-consciously postmodern style, calling attention to itself though its uses of angles, point of view shots, and extreme close-ups. Not The Artist (as far as I know), which aspires to take viewers into the cinematic past through imitation as well as setting.

Much like Midnight in Paris, Hugo transports viewers back into 1930s-ish Paris, and then back further, through the recreated movies. It implores us not to forget our past, even as it dares us to consider both Hugo’s own setting, as well as the turn of the century, when Méliès created his art, to be a cinematic golden age.

Movies that take place in the past take us back to that past. The same for movies set in the future. They are our time machines. And movies set in their own contemporary time? Just wait long enough and you’ll discover that they take you back in time as well. Sleeper looks a lot more like the 1970s than the 2000s, to say nothing of the 2200s. Any movie + enough time=nostalgia movie.

On the other hand, if we like Hugo, or Midnight in Paris, or The Artist, it’s hard not to see Scorsese in the end siding with Allen: the golden age is now.

Good thing, too, because it’s the only time we’ve got. Until scientists learn to check their cables, at least we have movies.